The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (9 page)

“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe,” Hanson said. “Care for some tea? I usually have a cup at this time of the morning.”

“Sure,” I said, “tea is fine.”

“Indian or China?”

“Indian, I guess.”

“Darjeeling all right?”

At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if some fruity type in white shorts and a blazer had come bounding through the door, inquiring with a lisp if anyone was for tennis. “Darjeeling is just dandy,” I said.

He pressed a bell push beside the fireplace—really, just like on the stage—while I lowered myself into one of the armchairs. It was so deep my knees nearly gave me an uppercut. Hanson lit a cigarette with a silver lighter and then positioned himself with an elbow on the mantelpiece and his ankles crossed and looked down at me, way below him. His expression, somewhat pained but forbearing, was that of a dutiful father compelled to have a serious talk with a wayward son. “Mr. Marlowe, did someone hire you to come here?” he asked.

“Someone like who?”

He seemed to wince; it was probably my grammar. Before he could reply, a door opened and an ancient party in a striped vest insinuated himself into the room. He looked so bloodless it was hard to believe he was alive. He was short and stocky and had gray cheeks and gray lips, and a bald gray pate over which a few long strands of oily gray hair were carefully plastered. “You rang, sir?” he said in a quavering voice; his British accent was the real thing. The Cahuilla Club was turning out to be some place, an Indian museum with a dash of Merrie Olde England thrown in.

“A pot of tea, Bartlett,” Hanson said loudly, the old fellow being deaf, evidently. “The usual.” He turned to me. “Cream? Sugar? Or would you prefer lemon?”

“Just the tea will be fine,” I said.

Bartlett nodded, swallowed, gave me a watery glance, and shuffled out.

“What were we saying?” Hanson asked.

“You wanted to know if someone hired me to come and talk to you. I asked who you thought such a someone might be.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s right.” He tapped the tip of his cigarette on the rim of a glass ashtray beside his elbow on the mantelpiece. “What I meant was that I can’t think who would be interested enough in the case of Mr. Peterson and his sad end to go to the trouble of hiring a private investigator to open it all up again. Especially since, as I say, the police have already been through the whole thing with a fine-tooth comb.”

I chuckled. I can do a good chuckle, when I try. “Combs the cops use tend to be gap-toothed, and clogged up with stuff you wouldn’t want to investigate too closely.”

“All the same, I can’t think why you’re here.”

“Well, you see, Mr. Hanson,” I said, shifting around in the depths of the chair in an effort to maneuver myself into something like a dignified position, “violent death always leaves loose ends. It’s a thing I’ve noticed.”

He was watching me again out of that lizard-like stillness. “What kind of loose ends?”

“You mean in Mr. Peterson’s case? Like I say, there are aspects of his death that raise certain questions.”

“And I asked, what kind of questions?”

There’s nothing like quiet relentlessness; the noisy kind never works as well.

“Well, for instance, the question of Mr. Peterson’s identity.”

“His identity.” It wasn’t a question. His voice had become as soft as a breeze over a battlefield after a particularly bloody engagement. “What question about his identity could there be? I saw him there on the road that night. There was no mistaking who it was. Plus, his sister was shown his corpse the next day and expressed no doubts.”

“I know, but the point is—and here we’re at the nub of the thing—someone spotted him recently in the street, and he wasn’t dead at all.”

There are are silences and silences. Some you can read, some you can’t. Whether Hanson was surprised by what I’d just said, whether he was astounded by it, or whether he was only saying nothing the better to let himself think, I didn’t know. I watched him—a hawk wouldn’t have done it more sharply—but still I couldn’t decide.

“Let me get this straight,” he began, but just then the door opened again and Bartlett the butler came in backward at an ape-armed stoop, carrying a wide tray on which there were cups and saucers and a silver teapot and little silver jugs and white linen napkins and I don’t know what all. He came forward and set the tray down on one of the small tables, sniffed, and padded out. Hanson leaned down and poured the tea into two cups—through a silver strainer, no less—and handed one to me. I balanced it on the arm of the chair. I had a vision of myself knocking it by accident with my elbow and sending the scalding stuff flooding into my lap. I should have had an aunt when I was small, one of those fierce ones in bombazine, with a lorgnette and a mustache, who would have coached me in how to comport myself in social situations like this.

I could see Hanson preparing to claim again, in that studied, jaded way of his, that he’d forgotten what we were talking about. “You wanted to get something straight,” I said, prompting him. He had taken up position by the fireplace again and was slowly stirring a silver spoon around in his tea, stirring and stirring.

“Yes,” he said, then paused—more thinking. “You say someone saw Mr. Peterson in the street recently.”

“That’s right.”

“Claimed to have seen him, that is.”

“The person was pretty certain.”

“And this person is…?”

“Someone who knew Mr. Peterson. Someone who knew him well.”

At that his eye took on a weaselly sharpness, and I wondered if I’d said too much. “Someone who knew him well,” he repeated. “Would that be a female someone?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Women tend to be more prone than men to that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Seeing a dead man walking in the street. Imagining they did.”

“Let’s just say this person was an associate of Mr. Peterson’s,” I said, “and leave it at that.”

“And this is the person who hired you to come here and make inquiries?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t say that.”

“Does that mean you’re operating on a secondhand report? On hearsay?”

“It was said, and I heard it.”

“And did you believe it?”

“Belief is not part of my program. I take no position. I just do the inquiring.”

“Right.” He drew the word out, giving it a sort of sighing fall. He smiled. “You haven’t touched your tea, Mr. Marlowe.”

I took a sip, to be polite. It was nearly cold already. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d drunk tea.

A shadow moved in the glass panel of the door we had entered by, and looking up I spotted there what I took to be a boy, thin and sharp-faced, peering in at us. Seeing me see him, he shifted quickly and was gone. I turned to Hanson. He didn’t seem to have noticed the figure at the door.

“Who did you call that night,” I asked, “after you’d seen the body?”

“The police.”

“Yes, but what police? Downtown or the Sheriff’s office?”

He scratched his ear. “I don’t think I know,” he said. “I just called the operator and asked for the police. A squad car came, and a motorcycle policeman. I think they were from Bay City.”

“You remember any of their names?”

“I’m afraid not. There were two plainclothes officers and the motorcyclist in uniform. They must have told me their names, I suppose, but if they did I’ve forgotten them. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to register such things very clearly. I hadn’t seen a dead man since my time in France.”

“You were in the war?”

He nodded. “The Ardennes—Battle of the Bulge.”

That brought on a silence, and it seemed almost that a breath of icy mountain air passed through the room. I sat forward in the armchair and cleared my throat. “I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, Mr. Hanson,” I said. “But can I ask you again if you’re sure, if you’re absolutely certain, that the man you saw lying dead on the road that night was Nico Peterson?”

“Who else would it have been?”

“I’ve no idea. But can you say you’re certain?”

He fixed me with those cool dark eyes. “Yes, Mr. Marlowe, I’m certain. I don’t know who it was that your employer saw in the street subsequently, but it wasn’t Nico Peterson.”

I lifted the cup and saucer carefully from the arm of the chair and put them back on the tray, then got myself to my feet, my kneecaps creaking. Sitting in that chair had been like squatting in a very small, very deep bath. “Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

“What will you do next?” he asked. He seemed genuinely curious.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I could try to find that hat-check girl—Stover, was it?”

“Mary Stover, yes. Frankly, I suspect you’d be wasting your time.”

“You’re probably right.”

He, too, put his teacup on the tray, and together we moved to the door where the butler had exited. Again Hanson stood back and ushered me through. We walked along a corridor with wall lights in ironwork brackets and a pale gray carpet so deep I swear I could feel the nap tickling my ankles. We passed through another smoking room, where there were more Indian artifacts on the walls and more Curtis prints. Then we were in another corridor, where the air was warmly heavy and smelled of liniment. “The pool is through there,” Hanson said, indicating a blank white door, “and then the gymnasium.”

As we were walking past it, the door opened and a woman in a white terry-cloth robe came out. She wore rubber beach shoes, and a big white towel was wrapped around her head like a turban. I registered a broad face and green eyes. I felt Hanson beside me hesitate an instant, but then he quickened his pace, touching a hand to my elbow and moving me on with him.

This time a young woman with blue-framed glasses was sitting behind the reception desk. She greeted her boss with a simpering smile; me she ignored. “There’ve been some calls for you, Mr. Hanson,” she said. “I have one on hold, from a Mr. Henry Jeffries.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back, Phyllis,” Hanson said, doling out one of his tight little smiles. He turned to me, offering his hand again. “Goodbye, Mr. Marlowe. It was interesting to talk to you.”

“Thanks for taking the time.”

We walked to the door and stepped outside, onto the square of red carpet. “I’d wish you luck in your inquiries,” he said, “only I don’t think they’re going to get anywhere.”

“It certainly seems that way.” I looked about at the trees, the sparkling lawn, the banks of multicolored blossoms. “Nice place to work,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Maybe I’ll come around some evening, shoot a game of pool—or snooker, I guess you’d say—maybe sample the house brandy.”

He couldn’t resist a faint smirk. “Do you know any members?”

“As a matter of fact, I do, sort of.”

“Have them bring you along. You’d be very welcome.”

Like hell, I thought, but I smiled nicely enough, tipped a finger to the brim of my hat, and walked away.

*   *   *

I was puzzled. What had been going on, exactly, for the past hour? The guided tour of the grounds, the history of the bougainvillea plant, the lecture on philanthropy, the tea ceremony—what had all that been about? Why had Hanson given so much ear time to a gumshoe asking nosy questions about a not very significant death on a nearby road? Was he just a guy with not enough to do, whiling away part of a lazy morning by entertaining a representative of the sordid world beyond the gilded gates of the Cahuilla Club? Somehow I wasn’t convinced that this was the case. And if it wasn’t, what did he know that he’d chosen not to tell me?

I had left the Olds parked under a tree, but of course the sun had moved again, as it insists on doing, and the front half of the car was quietly baking away. I opened all the doors and moved into the shade and smoked a cigarette while I waited for the air inside to cool off a bit.

As I stood there, I began to get the feeling that I was being watched. It was like the sensation you have when you’re lying on a warm beach and a cool breeze passes over your bare shoulder blades. I looked all around but could see no one. Then, behind me, I heard a quick step—it was the quickness of it that made me jump. I turned, and there was the little fellow I had seen shortly before when he had looked in through the glass door at Hanson and me. He wasn’t a boy, I saw now; in fact, I estimated he was somewhere in his fifties. He wore a uniform of khaki pants and a khaki shirt with short sleeves. He had a little wizened face and clawlike hands, and eyes so pale they seemed to have no color at all. He kept his face half turned away and regarded me sidelong. He seemed very tense, like some timid wild thing, a fox, or a hare, that had approached me out of curiosity and was ready to dart off at the slightest movement I might make.

“Morning, pilgrim,” I said, in friendly fashion.

At this he nodded to himself, with a crafty little smile, as if what I had said was exactly what he had expected me to say, as a way to fool him and lull him into a false sense of security. “I know you,” he said, in a rusty sort of voice, almost a whisper.

“Do you?”

“Course I do. I seen you with Hook.”

“You’re wrong there,” I said. “Don’t know any Hook.”

He smiled again, pinching his lips together. “Sure you do.”

I shook my head, guessing he was another one of Mr. Canning’s waifs and strays. I dropped the cigarette onto the dry leaves at my feet and stepped on it, then shut three doors of the car and climbed in at the fourth, behind the hot wheel. I rolled down the window. “Got to be going,” I said. “Nice talking to you.”

Still keeping himself half turned away from me, he sidled up to the car. “You got to be careful with that Hook,” he said. “Watch he don’t press-gang you into service.”

I put the key in the ignition and pressed the starter. There’s something grand and thrilling about the rolling burble of a big V-8 engine when it’s idling; it always makes me think of one of those turn-of-the-century New York society ladies, the statuesque ones with bustles and hats and soft pale prominent throats. When I gunned the engine, the thing turned into Teddy Roosevelt, all noise and bluster.

“Hasta la vista, muchacho,”
I said, giving the little guy a tight wave. He put a hand on the window frame, though, and wouldn’t let me go.